Affect in cross‐chronotope alignments in narrations about Aristides de Sousa Mendes and their subsequent circulations

Abstract

This article analyzes the role of emotion in narrations about the past, understandable as familial, intergenerational, or national. I examine how participants report and display affect in narratives about Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul of Bordeaux who issued thousands of lifesaving visas in June of 1940. Three sets of participants (descendants of visa recipients, Sousa Mendes' descendants, and Portuguese institutional representatives) each explicitly report and implicitly display how the Sousa Mendes story moves them emotionally. I then discuss how the emotion in these narratives may be circulated and taken up by broader audiences. Building on Irvine's discussion of the heteroglossia of affective expression (1990), participants may attribute emotion to others, signal emotion as occurring in the present or in a prior space–time, or merge emotional past and present in various types of emotional “reliving.” By treating emotion as eventlike, it can thus be considered chronotopic. I analyze the relationships between (re)presentation of emotion across multiple narrated and narrating chronotopes. This approach reveals how differently positioned participants' cross‐chronotope alignments yield particular types of affective displays and experiences that others can then take up and recontextualize.